Democracy: Mistaken Theories

During the last several hundred years very few people recognized that freedom and democracy for all countries and for all people was an actual and realistic goal. There was a widely believed theory that many countries would be unable to adopt democracy due to their lack of experience with freedom and with free institutions. This was the theory of cultural dissimilarity.

We were also told that many countries had to be governed by authoritarianism and centralized autocratic rule since the people of such nations lacked the ability to govern themselves. This was the theory of the indispensable strongman.

Another widely held theory was that hungry people living in non-democratic nations do not care about freedom and democracy. They had to scratch out a living and democracy would have to wait. They just were not interested or concerned about vague, unrealistic concepts such as freedom and liberty. That is what we were told.

But all of these theories have been thoroughly discredited by the swelling tide of democracy. Today there are more free nations than ever before and their number continues to grow.

What does all this mean? It means that Jefferson and Lincoln were right. Their perception of future history was correct. Nation after nation has become democratic and the movement is stronger than ever. The democratic world movement, as it should be called, began in America and even though we had our revolution several hundred years ago that same revolution is going on in other nations today. It takes different forms in different countries nevertheless it is the same revolution.

Next: Democracy: The Democratic World Movement »